The StratEDgy blog is intended to be a thoughtful hub for discussion about strategy and competition in higher education.

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Learning with LEGOs

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In 2012, LEGO manufactured 45.7 billion LEGO bricks – that’s 5.2 million per hour - to keep up with global demand from children and adults. According to National Geographic Megafactories: LEGO, children around the world spend ~5 billion hours a year playing with LEGOs. It’s not hard to see why when there are 915,103,765 different ways to combine just 6 individual LEGO bricks.

Whether exposed to LEGOs as a child or an adult, National Geographic notes that, “Many of the adult fans credit LEGO in shaping their careers.” One such adult fan said, “I’m a civil engineer. LEGO is very helpful if you choose a technical profession because it really structures your mind to think about how things work, how things are put together, how things are structurally strong or weak.”

Undergraduate engineering majors are increasingly seeing LEGOs in the classroom. According to University Business, educators at institutions like Carnegie Mellon, Tufts University and Arizona State are formally including LEGOs in their engineering curriculum.

And much like higher education, LEGO has gone digital. According to the International Business Times and FastCompany, last week Google and LEGO partnered to launch “Build with Chrome” where you can build anything you want out of LEGOs, and then place your structure anywhere in the world using Google Maps.

Perhaps this new technology can augment the other ways LEGOs are keeping students engaged in the classroom.